Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Alternative Responses to the Depression

Consider how FDR was criticized from both the right and the left when he instituted his New Deal policies in the United States. How did Canadians respond to their government's dealings with the economy? How did this vary by region or by social class?

6 comments:

Well of course there were people for and against his New Deal policies in the United States but once people saw that it was actually working the Canadians wanted to imitate it some how because they thought that if it was working in the United States it would do the same for Canada. But just because it worked somewhere does not mean it will work everywhere else and instead it made matters worse in Canada. Canada was just trying everything, they went into several different paths and each path ended in failure and made the economy a lot worse.

FDR's New Deal policies did not look as good at the beginning as they did once the effects of them were concrete. Before they took effect, of course there was going to be skepticism, especially when dealing with something as serious as the economy. With the economy already the worst it had ever been, there was a real fear that the policies could make the already diminishing economy even worse, and therefore making it even harder to recover at all. I think the problem with Canada's plans for their economy was that they were just taking ideas from other countries that had succeeded in recovering their economy, but as Chandler said, just because a policy or idea works in one country, does not necessarily mean that it will work in other or all countries the same way. In Canada's case, it didn't help, it actually made matters worse. They were lacking ingenuity and i think that this was one of the biggest reasons why the Canadian economy remained poor for such a long amount of time.

The people of Canada decided that the governments old policies of capitalism needed to be discarded and replaced with socialism. In Carnagy, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was formed. There was a lot of resentment in largely French-speaking areas, like Quebec, that the employers were English. The Union Nationale was formed there. The forming of these parties didn't necessarily HELP Canada, but it was the citizens' way of protest against the government.

Without a doubt, every time someone in the government passes a law or a new set of policies, the people are always going to criticize the government because the government cannot please everyone. In FDR’s case, when he passed the New Deal policies in the United States, people criticized him because the New Deal it was costing the country lots of money and it was giving the government more money, also it was making it more expensive for employers to hire new employees. The Canadians responded to their government dealing with the economy by trying to adapt FDR’s New Deal plan. Like everyone else said, just because the plan worked overall for one country doesn’t mean that it will work for another, its not a one size fits all kind of plan. Canada ended up being worse off after trying to emulate them after the US rather than coming up with an entirely new plan to their specific countries needs.

As Meghan said, people always criticize new laws made by the government. When FDR passed the new deal policies people weren't really sure if they agreed with him. There were many factors that caused citizens to be wary about the new deal policies. They would cost a lot of money and it wasn't really helping the citizens as much as it was helping the government. The new deal policies were basically just trying to help the government and citizens didn't appreciate it because they were just giving the government money so that they could spend it on themselves and build up the government. It made it harder for people to make more money and support themselves and families. Canadians also didn't like the way their government was dealing with everything going on. The government wanted them to do the same thing as FDR was doing in america because they thought that it was best to just do whatever america was doing. But canada and the us are two different countries, so the plan didnt work for Canada as it did for the us.

As everyone said, FDR, proposed the New Deal with a lot of innovations and programs that were received pretty badly at the beginning. At the end, after a few, it worked and everyone was better off by it. The Canadian government (more specifically Bennett) , therefore tried to copy them as usual, taking example of them and trying to make a very similar New Deal for Canada, but it never worked because Bennett did not really do anything to actually make it work.